Though recent reports
show the U.S. is graduating more high school students than ever
before, the new data suggest that teens bound for college and
careers on average fall short of a solid, or “proficient,” level
of performance in reading and math. Just over a quarter of
students scored at the proficient level in math, while a third
hit that mark in reading.

The results come from an assessment measuring math and reading
that was administered last
year to some 92,000 12th-graders around the country. Known as the
Nation’s Report Card, the National Assessment of Educational
Progress (NAEP) is viewed by many experts as the gold standard
for gauging student understanding of academic subjects.

Overview

In a statement, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan expressed
concern that blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans far
underperformed compared to whites and Asians. Blacks as a group
averaged below-basic in math while Native Americans and Hispanics
scored just above that threshold.

Still, the data show progress: Since 2005, math scores for
African-Americans and Hispanics rose five and seven points,
respectively, on a 300-point scale. Native American scores
remained flat. Whites and Asian-Americans saw their scores grow
by four and 10 points, respectively. Reading scores were either
flat or rose for all demographic groups since 2005, but increased
the most for whites and Asian-Americans — by four and nine
points, respectively.

“Achievement gaps among ethnic groups have not narrowed,”
Duncan said. “We project that our nation’s public schools will
become majority-minority this fall – making it even more urgent
to put renewed attention into the academic rigor and equity of
course offerings and into efforts to redesign high schools.”

He added: “We must reject educational stagnation in our
high schools, and as a nation, we must do better for all
students, especially for African-American and Latino students.”

Peggy Carr, associate commissioner of the research agency that
administers NAEP, cautioned that achievement gaps can mask
improvements. “Yeah, we didn’t see any gap closures, and that’s
because everyone [except for Native Americans] was going up,” she
said. “We want gaps to close, but the only way that’s
really going to happen when everyone is making progress is if
students at the bottom of the distribution have to make greater
gains.”

Yet student course-taking seems to correlate with how well they
perform on NAEP, and depending on the
researcher,how they may perform at a
university. The chart below shows average scores for students
according to the highest level of math they’ve completed.

Some of the changes in the 12th-grade results may be attributed
to changes in who gets tested. John Q. Easton, director of the
federal Institute of Education Sciences, notes that since 1992
the percentage of Hispanics in the U.S. at this grade level has
tripled from 7 percent to 20 percentwhile
the share of whites fell from three-quarters to just less than 60
percent.

The number of tested students with learning disabilities – a
group that tends to underperform on standardized tests – doubled
to 11 percent over that time period. Easton also said that even
as the testing population grew in the past two decades, the
number of students excluded from taking the test declined from 5
to 2 percent.

And because high school graduation rates have increased from 74
to 80 percent since 1992, the type of lower-performing students
who might have left school in years past are now more likely to
stick around until 12th grade. Graduation rates among certain
minority groups in particular have made major gains: Since 2006,
the high school graduation rate has climbed by 15 percentage
points for Hispanics and by nine points for blacks, federal data
show.

Students with more educated parents performed better on the
latest 12th grade NAEP tests, though some demographic groups
showed higher scores than others.

Scores by parent education in math (a proficient score is 176 out
of 300 points):